Film review by Kevin Patterson
PLAYING GOD Rating: **1/2 (out of four) R, 1997 Directed by Andy Wilson. Written by Mark Haskell Smith. Starring David Duchovny, Timothy Hutton, Angelina Jolie.
PLAYING GOD would like to be a Serious Movie that explores Important Questions, most notably whether or not it's ethical for a doctor to treat seriously wounded criminals privately, rather than take them to a hospital where they would almost certainly be arrested after recovering. These questions are present in the screenplay, but most of the time they are briefly mentioned in voiceover so that the filmmakers can get on to the next bit of quirky dialogue or the next violent confrontation. It's another Quentin Tarantino imitation that occasionally takes a stab at being a character drama, but it doesn't succeed completely at being either of the two.
As the film begins, we are introduced to Eugene Sands (David Duchovny), a former doctor who has lost his license after losing a patient while high on amphetamines. He now lives the lonely, aimless life of an addict, and when he walks into a bar one night to buy drugs, two hit men suddenly burst in and shoot another patron. Eugene reacts out of instinct and quickly acts to save the man. Gangster Raymond Blossom (Timothy Hutton) soon hears about the incident and wants to hire Eugene to work as his private doctor, assisting in situations in which one of his men is critically wounded. Eugene agrees, temporarily, but soon gets tired of being surrounded by murderers and psychopaths and, having fallen for Raymond's girlfriend Claire (Angelina Jolie) in the meantime, he starts looking for a way out for both of them. A possibility is presented in the form of an FBI sting operation, led by an agent who wants Eugene to be his man on the inside when they bust Raymond.
I would have liked to have seen more of Eugene's internal moral conflict, as well as his later struggle to kick his drug habit. Both, however, are portrayed rather blandly and aren't given much screen time: his qualms about working for Raymond are mostly confined to voiceover, and his withdrawal period doesn't look like anything more than a guy having a bad case of the flu. PLAYING GOD is only interested in its characters up to a point: they're mostly devices to set the quirky crime caper in motion. Duchovny does what he can with the material, portraying a basically good person who's taken a couple of serious wrong turns and delivering cynical one-liners with a dry tone that always manages to draw a laugh. Timothy Hutton, who plays Raymond as an unstable, overconfident crime lord wannabe, also turns in a good performance, alternating between maniacally over the top and subtly weird and intimidating. Unfortunately, I can't sing the same praises for the FBI agent who contacts Eugene: for some reason, the filmmakers decided to play this guy as an obsessive, nervous mess who can't sit still and who sometimes seems like he's an even bigger head case than Raymond. Somehow I wasn't too surprised when his sting operation fell apart at the end.
Still, PLAYING GOD is noteworthy on two counts. One is that Eugene Sands never turns into a stereotypical action hero, even when the FBI operation collapses and Eugene pursues Raymond and Claire on his own. I kept waiting for him and Raymond to have some drawn-out fistfight or gun battle, but thankfully, they never did. In fact, the final moments of the film are about as far from two men trying to kill each other as can be. The relationship between Eugene and Claire is also written pretty well: it's not the first outlaw romance in Hollywood and it won't be the last, but it is portrayed believably, finding the right mix of typical attraction and intimacy and the distinct way of relating to each other that comes from their experience on the wrong side of the law.
Other than that, however, PLAYING GOD is really just another attempt at an off-beat crime caper, and a fairly average one at that. It has many of the right ingredients, but somehow they don't really add up to much of anything. There's an amusing scene towards the end, for example, in which one of Raymond's thugs sheepishly admits to the other that he forgot the ski mask he needed for their upcoming heist, but we barely know the pair, and the scene doesn't really have anything to do with anything else in the movie. Criminals sit around tossing expletives at each other, but it never results in anything more than a momentary laugh. Duchovny's and Hutton's performances are both good, but unlike the characters of, say, PULP FICTION or THE USUAL SUSPECTS, they don't play off of each other in any distinct way: they just sort of happen to be in the same movie.
I saw PLAYING GOD on video, and I think maybe that's the best way to see it. It's not a very complete experience, nor is the script very thorough, but as an amalgamation of moderately interesting bits and pieces (along with a few exceptional moments), it's a decent way to pass an hour and a half at home.
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